Artificial intelligence to help intensive care doctors

University of Sheffield engineers are working on an intelligent computer system, which imitates a doctor's brain to make treatment decisions for intensive care patients.

The system will take some of the workload from emergency medical teams by monitoring patients' vital signs and then evaluating and administering the right amounts of different drugs needed - a job usually carried out by specialist medical doctors.

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The team, led by Professor Mahdi Mahfouf in the university's department of automatic control and systems engineering, is pioneering the intelligent decision-support system which, in effect, duplicates the decision making processes of specialist medical doctors.

He explained the system is made unique by its ability to learn, adapt, and make informed decisions and decide on the types and quantities of drugs to give to patients in a matter of seconds.

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Dr Mahfouf said: "This new system not only monitors and treats critical patients, but it can also learn from the experiences of medical staff, who can override the machine at any time.

"If overridden, the system assimilates the doctor's input and uses the new information to make decisions about similar cases in the future."

The system is not intended to replace the work that doctors do in intensive care units, but to provide them with assistance by evaluating the complex interactions of different drugs that are needed to treat patients.

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